Dallas – September 18, 2026 -- E Source has launched advanced scenario planning capabilities within its GridInform® Vegetation Intelligence software, allowing electric utilities to model multi-year vegetation management strategies and quantify reliability, risk, and cost tradeoffs before deploying field crews or capital.
New tool cuts vegetation planning timelines from months to minutes
The software lets utilities run long-term planning scenarios directly within the platform rather than relying on static, point-in-time analyses or external studies. Planners can evaluate vegetation investment strategies over five- to ten-year horizons by integrating infrastructure data, vegetation conditions, weather exposure, and outage history.
Users can compare cycle-based maintenance against targeted work programs and test how changes in funding levels and prioritization affect future reliability outcomes and cost trajectories.
Vegetation remains a leading cause of outages, raising investment stakes
Vegetation is identified as a leading driver of outages and a primary source of reliability risk for utilities, yet long-term investment decisions have historically been made without the ability to test strategy performance over time. The Vegetation Intelligence platform uses integrated infrastructure, environmental, and outage data to pinpoint where vegetation creates the greatest reliability risk, guiding prioritization decisions before scenario planning evaluates potential outcomes ahead of execution.
Regulatory scrutiny pushes utilities to justify spend-to-reliability links
Jonah Keim, Vice President, Deliverability at E Source, said the shift is not only in how vegetation decisions are made but in what utilities must now justify to regulators and stakeholders. He noted that approaches unable to link spending to reliability outcomes are becoming harder to defend, and the new scenario planning capability allows utilities to demonstrate that linkage in advance.
Utilities using the capability report clearer visibility into where vegetation risk is concentrated and greater confidence in how investment decisions affect reliability outcomes.